File photo | The RepublicanMelvin Jones will be back in court on drug trafficking charges. His lawyer argued Friday a FBI agent sent an undercover informant after his client although the agency also pursued a civil rights case on behalf of Jones.

SPRINGFIELD – A lawyer representing Melvin Jones III in a drug trafficking case argued in Hampden Superior Court Friday that an FBI agent sent an undercover informant after his client while the law enforcement agency was simultaneously exploring a civil rights case against local police on Jones' behalf.

The informant has since been charged with the murder of a 16-year-old in an unrelated case.

Jones, 30, who is black, was beaten by a white patrolman during a traffic stop in November 2009 in Springfield. The incident was caught on video, and now ex-patrolman Jeffrey M. Asher was convicted in February of assault charges and sentenced to 18 months in jail.

Jones’ lawyer, public defender Jared Olanoff, filed a motion to compel FBI supervisor Mark Karangekis and Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Grant to testify at a trial which will vet whether Jones was indeed selling cocaine to FBI informant Kamani Anderson in 2010.

Olanoff argued in court Karangekis and Grant were pursuing a federal civil rights prosecution against Asher and other white officers connected to the beating, but the FBI paid Anderson more than $10,000 as an undercover informant to target Jones in December 2010.

“Mark Karangekis was supervising the civil rights investigation and hired Kamani Anderson as an informant,” Olanoff said, noting that Jones met with Karangekis and Grant to discuss a federal civil rights case against police just months after the beating, but Anderson sold him drugs at the behest of the FBI within the same year.

State prosecutors have said Jones’ co-defendants, Alfred and Raheim Reid, were among the original targets of a federal investigation that focused on the inner city, as opposed to specific individuals.

Assistant District Attorney Donna Donato said the civil rights and drug investigations were on parallel tracks, and that Jones stumbled into the criminal probe of his own accord, not by being lured by the FBI’s informant.

“It’s not my fault and it’s not the FBI’s fault that (Jones’ co-defendants) brought him to sell drugs to the informant,” Donato told Judge Tina Page. “Let’s not use words like the FBI tanked the investigation. I find that offensive.”

Olanoff suggested he has an entrapment defense because Jones was not selling drugs at the time and was drawn in by Anderson.

To complicate matters, Anderson has been charged with the July 2012 murder of Tyrel Wheeler – after he was registered as an FBI informant. The teen-ager was found shot multiple times at Washington and Meredith streets.

The commonwealth has noted in court filings it will not be calling its star witness, as a result.

Page will rule later on the government’s motion to quash Grant as a witness at trial; Karangekis is scheduled to testify.